New Online Service Offers Same-Day Specialty Foods Deliveries in San Francisco

PublishedDecember 13, 2013

An online service offering on-demand, same-day delivery of wine, spirits, specialty foods, and more has launched in San Francisco. To celebrate its launch, the company is offering San Francisco area residents free same-day delivery. Lasso users can order a bottle of champagne, fresh cheese and charcuterie and have the order delivered in less than two hours or up to 30 days in advance. Available on desktop and through an iPhone app, Lasso currently serves San Francisco, with more markets coming soon. Lasso is the first online service to provide same day delivery of spirits in San Francisco.

“Lasso’s mission is to help reconnect people with the best local stores in their community, starting with artisan beverage and food purveyors,” said Adam Zbar, co-founder and CEO of Lasso. “During our pre-launch trial, we were excited to see unexpectedly fast sales growth and large order sizes validating the strong latent demand and product market fit for our service.”

“We built Lasso to make shopping locally as easy and convenient as shopping online,” added co-founder and CTO Braxton Woodham. “During the hectic holiday season, we offer the fastest and easiest way to host an event and send gifts locally.”

The company also announced it closed a $1.7M seed financing round led by PivotNorth Capital and including investments from Baseline Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, and Relevance Capital. High profile angel investors include Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, CEO Joyus, former president of Asia/Latin America, Google; Ted Meisel, former CEO Overture (acquired by Yahoo for$1.6B); and Lars Albright and Andy Miller, co-founders of Quattro Wireless (acquired by Apple for $275M). The company will use the funds to develop the service, build technology and scale the business.

“At PivotNorth, we like world-class founders disrupting very large markets with innovations in computer science,” said Tim Connors, PivotNorth’s founder. “Lasso has architected a first-to-market service that connects consumers with local inventory in the $4.7 trillion local retail shopping market.”

Lasso supports small businesses and plays a pivotal role in extending their distribution and providing an important new revenue channel.

“Especially during the holidays, our bandwidth to acquire new customers and distribution channels is limited,” said Ray Bair, owner of Cheese Plus in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood, which is one of Lasso’s merchant partners at launch. Added Michael Priolo, an owner of The Jug Shop, “Since working with Lasso, we’re pleased to say we’ve seen an increase in our wine and spirit sales, generating thousands of dollars a week in additional revenue for our store.”